Frank's an ex-TV writer, now sandwich-generation ADHD homemaker with a wife, two kids, a dog, and an eighty-something mother-in-law in a house that won’t stay clean. He writes here to try to figure out what’s going on there.

Archives: March 2014

Going on midnight on a Tuesday night in the middle of last December, I’m rubbing my eyes, scratching my head, and doing that neck-rolling stretching thing to try to stay awake and focused.
Sitting next to me in our living room, her feet propped on the edge of the coffee table, my 18-year-old daughter Coco flips through her textbook on the cushion beside her, checks something on...
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In the wake of my father's death, facing up to her loss, my mother needed me — obsessive, distracted me, in all my imperfect weirdness.

“We can’t, it’s not right...,” my 91-year-old mother wailed between sobs. I held her in my arms as this harsh rogue wave of grief rolled through her heart, splintering the careful defenses she’d built up stick by stick since my father died last March after the three years of his mental and physical deterioration that nearly killed her too.
Still sobbing against my chest, her wails began...
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